Sanctuary of Faith W. Zeitler [PIANO]
Alchemical Cauldron W. Zeitler
Recently I wrote about how Roman Emperor Constantine (272-337) realized that flourishing ‘renegade’ Christianity could actually be an ally in his attempts to hold the Roman Empire together. So he legalized Christianity in 325, and convened the Council of Nicea to settle what the One True Christianity would be (so the One True Church could be of maximum usefulness to the Empire). And thus began the unholy alliance of Church and State that would characterize Western Christianity until relatively recent times.
There’s nuance here I’d like to explore. One might be tempted to think what a poor choice the Catholic Church made jumping into bed with Constantine — easy to say when they’ve been feeding you to the lions and suddenly they offer to stop. But furthermore, one should remember that civilization as they knew it was coming apart at the seams. They were increasingly having to deal with barbarian hordes rampaging through the Western Empire. And the economic consequences of that (like crops). We in comfy 21st century America haven’t had to deal with barbarian armies destroying everything in sight in the Inland Empire. Or real famine. Western Civilization, including the Western Church, was fighting for its very survival, and just surviving a fight for your very existence can be its own enormous accomplishment. And sometimes survival isn’t pretty.
So I’d also like to highlight a few positive contributions of the Catholic Church in the millennium when they were the only Church around (400-1500-ish) just to balance things out.
The first is hospitals. To be sure there were ‘medical centers’ in the ancient world, notably the Temples of Asclepius (the god of healing). However, there were only a handful of them in the Mediterranean world, so of course these would be inaccessible to the poor — due to the cost of travel alone.
Instead, a tradition evolved during the development of the Catholic Church when benevolent outreach included not only caring for the sick but also feeding the hungry, caring for widows and children, clothing the poor, and offering hospitality to strangers. This religious ethos of charity continued with the rapid outgrowth of monastic orders in the fifth and sixth centuries and extended into the Middle Ages. This idea of care for the poor — in the form of food, shelter, and medical care, was a uniquely Christian idea (dare I say Roman Catholic idea?) For example, our own St. Bernardine’s Hospital here in San Bernardino: “It was in 1931 that the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word first founded a small hospital in San Bernardino. Today, that hospital — St. Bernardine Medical Center — has grown into a 342-bed, not-for-profit health care facility delivering compassionate, quality care to all who enter our doors.” Of course many hospitals have been founded by Protestants too. My point is that the very idea of hospitals available to all was a Christian idea first developed by the Catholics.
My second observation is that virtually all Christian mystics in Christian history have been Catholic, for example St. Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, St. John of the Cross, Catherine of Siena. Furthermore, when the Catholic authorities decided you had had a genuine mystical experience of God, it didn’t matter if you were a man or woman — they pretty much left you alone, even when your Experience strained the boundaries of kosher Catholic theology.
My final observation is that early on the Catholic Church appreciated the importance of the Feminine — as exhibited by their veneration of Mary. We may disagree with this particular practice. My only point is that they had an appreciation of the super-importance of the Feminine, and gave the Feminine an extremely prominent place in their theology. (While oppressing women generally at the same time. We humans can be so self-contradictory!)
I’m not trying to put the Catholic Church on some kind of pedestal. Instead, I’m trying to show that from a place of ignorance it’s easy to reduce folks to simplistic ‘they’re Good’, or ‘they’re Evil’. But when one goes to the trouble to understand their context and history, whether it be an individual or a group or an institution, sometimes we discover that we might have made the same choices ourselves. Which in hindsight may not have been the best of choices. And maybe they also got some things right.
So, today, may we do our best to learn from the mistakes of the past, grateful for what they got right, and press on. Hoping that the mistakes WE will inevitably make won’t be even worse!